So a giant blizzard is about to bury the east coast, specifically Washington, DC. Well, if you’re looking for something steamy set in the Capitol, I have some ideas. You can’t read all the time–okay, you can, but you might not want to–so what should you watch between books and cocoa?

The clear answer is Paul Michael Glaser’s romantic comedy The Cutting Edge (1992).

If somehow you haven’t seen it, it’s essentially an updated version of The Taming of the Shrew set against the backdrop of pairs figure skating. Our shrew is Kate (Moira Kelly), a spoiled and notoriously difficult skater who lost her latest partner 18 months before the Olympics. She needs a new one or else she won’t be able to make a play for the medal she came so close to winning the last time. The only problem is that no one will skate with her.

Enter our Petruchio, Doug (DB Sweeney), a hockey player whose career was cut short by an injury. Skating with Kate not only brings him a healthy paycheck by way of her wealthy dad but is also his last shot to get of his dead-end job at his brother’s bar.

What follows is completely predictably and utterly charming. Kate and Doug are enemies, then they’re friends, and finally lovers, all the while trying to perfect an impossible skating move.

It’s the rare winter romance that comes with scarcely any holiday trimmings (they exchange Christmas gifts and there’s a brief New Year’s scene). But more seriously, I would argue that it’s the first New Adult romance, and it may still be the most influential entry. It includes, fully formed, most of the tropes we still see in the subgenre, including the protagonists’ tragic backstory (Kate’s mother’s death, Doug’s injury), drama with the parents/the struggle for independence, banter, tension, angst, and sports.

The Cutting Edge just about the perfect movie for a snowpocalypse–anytime of year.

Next up in our 60s set/60s produced romance series is Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). A delightful, and surprisingly dark and risque romance, featuring Jack Lemon in one of cinema’s great beta hero roles and a luminous Shirley MacLaine as the object of his adoration. This one comes with a content warning for its representation of mental illness and suicide.

The basic–and quite adult–set-up is that Lemon is a much put-up peon at a drug company. A group of managers there including the odious Fred MacMurray, promise him promotion and upward mobility…if he lets them use his apartment for their affairs. He’s unhappy with the situation, but can’t see a way out of it. All the while, he’s nursing a crush on the woman who runs the office building’s elevators (MacLaine), who is also being pursued by MacMurray. She eventually falls for MacMurray’s lies and when the affair end badly, she attempts suicide at the apartment, unaware that it’s Lemon’s. Lemon revives her and then cares for her as she recovers. But when she’s back on her feet, will she remember that MacMurray is an ass? And will Lemon ever work up the gumption to quit his job?

My advice is to watch The Apartment immediately after Pillow Talk (1959), a film only one year older but which feels like it’s from a different generation. To watch The Apartment is to watch modern life come to mainstream American movies. You can practically see the studio system crumble on screen. From the way the black and white cinematography looks, to the banter, to the treatment of mental illness and suicide (though these are imperfect from a modern point of view), to the characterization of MacLaine, to the frank engagement with extra and pre-marital sex, and most of all, Lemon as the atypical romantic hero.

It’s a movie that has some darkness, but it’s a wholly different glimpse into mid-century life and courtship rituals. Watch it and play gin rummy tonight.

We haven’t had one of these in a while, have we? In the lead up to the release of Star Dust, I want to spotlight romantic movies set in the 1960s or produced in the 60s. First up is Tom Hanks’s (yes, that guy) music rom-com That Thing You Do! (1996).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs_h7YdIe_k

I’ve had a soft-spot in my heart for this movie since I went on my first-ever dates to it. But a recent article at UPROXX reminded me how stinking charming it is. Our basic story: the drummer of a small-time band in 1964 Erie, PA, breaks his arm. A new guy (Tom Everett Scott) steps in, convinces them to make their big song more up-tempo, and the next thing they know, they’re in possession of a hit record and a recording contract. The band’s handsome front man (Johnathan Scheach) treats his girlfriend (Liv Tyler) like crap, so when the band inevitably falls apart weeks later, we cheer when his girlfriend and the new drummer ride off into the sunset together.

It’s an insubstantial confection of a movie, but it works because of the pitch-perfect recreation of the 60s. The sets, the costumes, and above all the music, are perfection. There is the catchy as hell title track, but I also like the slow-dance B-side “All My Only Dreams.” The entire soundtrack (which I own) is a 60s sound-alike wonder. The movie also gets the sheer fantasticalness of success right. The scene in which the band plays a fictional version of The Ed Sullivan Show is just joyful. We know it can’t last; we don’t really want it to. But gosh, it’s a fun ride.

In terms of the romance, Liv Tyler has never been lovelier on screen than she is here. And Tom Everett Scott is delightful and kind; the absolute best version of a beta hero. When they finally confess their feelings (and share one hell of a kiss) it has more of a jolt than you’d expect from something this frothy.

That Thing You Do! is an amuse bouche for your ears and a lovely invocation of the 60s. I commend it to you tonight.

It was difficult for me to pick the right film for today. It’s Fine Romance Friday, yes, but it’s also Halloween. I dislike scary movies intensely. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from the time I watched the first 10 minutes of The Silence of the Lambs. Plus, scary movies don’t usually have romance–something about serial killers not being romantic.

I considered several Hitchcock films, but they didn’t seem particularly related to the holiday. “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” has Linus and Lucy in the pumpkin patch. But then it came to me: Frank Capra’s 1944 screwball comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. Sold!

Starring Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, and pretty much every character actor in mid-1940s Hollywood, it’s the simple tale of a writer who has made a career decrying love and marriage…that is, until he falls for the girl-next-door. They have a quickie ceremony on Halloween at City Hall, but before they can escape on their honeymoon, they run home to tell their families. Hijinks ensue.

The plot of this film is batty even by the standards of a screwball comedy. It involves sweet old ladies committing murder, sibling rivalry, delusional relatives (literally), criminality, plastic surgery, jokes about publishing, and a meditation on Teddy Roosevelt and masculinity. Oh and Cary Grant plays a guy named Mortimer. It’s delightful.

Pauline Kael famously wrote that the screwball comedy “turned love and marriage into vaudeville acts and changed the movie heroine from sweet clinging vine into vaudeville partner.” Arsenic and Old Lace isn’t the most successful example because it’s a bit light on the romance. I want to know how Priscilla Lane got Cary Grant to propose in the first place and I want her to be a more equal partner than she is; she’s forced to be the damsel in distress a lot. If anything, the film substitutes Grant/Mortimer’s aunts for character development of the romantic lead. They are the main feminine presence in the film, though they are totally charming. Additionally for all the trappings of humor, it’s a dark film and can be legitimately scary. So I don’t think it’s a pure screwball comedy. But it strikes a compelling balance between a few spine tingles, a wonderfully witty script, and several sequences of laugh-out-loud physical comedy.

If you’re looking for a light Halloween film with a bit of romance, I commend Arsenic and Old Lace to you. It would pair nicely with some elderberry wine–though hold the arsenic.

I haven’t done a film post in forever! So let’s rectify that with Fred Schepisi’s 1987 rom-com Roxanne. The movie updates the nineteenth-century play Cyrano de Bergerac and stars Steve Martin as a small town fire chief in love with a beautiful astronomer (Daryl Hannah). He assumes she’d never go for a guy like him–namely one with an epic nose. And so when he discovers her crush on the handsome but shallow Rick Rossovich, he gives that guy the right words to succeed with her, saying all the things he wishes he could but doesn’t dare through a handsome mask. Hijinks ensue and the source material is updated with a happy ending.

Roxanne is pretty darn charming. It uses its small town Colorado setting to great advantage, has an excellent supporting cast (led by Shelley Duvall and Fred Willard), and is funny–particularly the self-deprecating exchange in which Martin comes up with twenty creative insults for his own nose and the ear-flap hat/feeding of the lines scenes. In another moment, Martin convinces a group of women to go to Roxanne’s house looking for aliens in order to interrupt a liaison he made happen; his imitations of the aliens with suckers on their hands and feet is a standard joke in my family.

But beyond the obvious humor, I like the film’s quieter moments: the ways in which Martin conveys his character’s vulnerabilities and fears beyond his public persona. The film laughs at his large nose, but it also shows us the shadow of real emotion under the jokes. Plus, the letters Martin writes Hannah are quite romantic.

It’s not ground-breaking and further it’s imperfect. I’m always frustrated that Hannah falls for the ruse. She’s supposed to be smart for crying out loud! But she does get to voice why Martin’s actions were stupid in the last act and he does a good grovel. Plus the film doesn’t engage in any slut shaming for her sleeping with Rossovich unlike another some other films from the same period like The Money Pit.

But despite its imperfections, it’s a great choice for an early autumn Friday, when the sky’s still clear enough to look for comets. On such a Friday, I commend Roxanne to you.